Giving a new lease on life to abandoned tea gardens

In our quest to secure reliable sources of organic and low pesticide teas, we’ve taken a logical but nonetheless bold step of acquiring tea gardens recently. Being able to fully control the source of your raw leaf material has become a key concern in order to ensure a quality supply of tea that meets our highest standards as well as the required conformity to certification norms. Very soon Taiwan Tea Crafts will be able to propose tailor-made teas for which we will be 100% accountable and responsible for the end result… as I write this, part of me is freaking out at this prospect. In any event, here’s the story of how we got to give a new lease on life to some abandoned tea fields in the hope of making not so bad tea with them. If all fails, at least it will give me something to write about for a few more chronicles.

Since the New Year, we’ve been casually asking around if anyone had tea fields for sale or rent in our area. Surely enough, the news got quickly around and farmers and land owners started landing on our door step to discuss their offerings. Several tea gardens were visited but none that would meet our criteria. You see, much like shopping for a house, on the top of our list was a great concern for the neighbouring environment. The biggest problem when wishing to adopt agricultural practices that do without the use of chemical pesticides or fertilizer is contamination from your neighbours. Here in Taiwan, agricultural land is divided in tiny lots sharing great proximity to each other. The agricultural mix is also very diversified. Diversity can be a good thing as it lowers the risk of pest infestation. That is, if everyone around you plays by the same rules as you and doesn’t use pesticides. If they do, they are simply pushing the unwanted critters on your lot while at the same time contaminating your pristine garden with their chemicals due to the proximity factor. On a good windy day, airborne chemicals can travel far and affect fields that are kilometres away. Then, there is the issue of the quality of the tea stock. We were shown several fields of old dried-up bushes that were at the end of their productive life cycle. This meant replanting and waiting a couple of years, if not more, before the new bushes could yield anything. That was ruled out. We are already weaning baby bushes if you recall. Running a tea nursery was not our objective. We wished to find fields from which we could pick leaves from now. Spring is in the air, and that’s how Spring fever expresses itself around here — through a yearning to pick and make Spring tea!

A month ago, a friend stopped by. He announced he had found something for us and invited us to hop into his car to go and see. As we drove towards his find, he got into a good used car salesman pitch and prep’d us to see the potential of what we were going to witness and asked us not pay too much attention to its present state. Surely enough, his words were warranted as we could barely distinguish the presence of tea bushes and their familiar row configuration throughout the field of weeds we were standing next to upon our arrival. The following “before” shots give you a good idea of what we saw that day.

Click on any picture to activate the captioned slide show

 

Surely enough, the potential was there. Of the three fields we were offered, each had surroundings that were not critically problematic. The tea stock was a mixture of Si Ji Chun (Four Season) and Cui Yu (Jade) cultivars. The bushes were still lively and, best of all, the fields were left abandoned for close to three years. That meant that no fertilizer was used nor any spraying done during all that time, so the potential was definitely there! So, we called the deal and from then on we had one month, at the most, to get the fields ready for picking. That meant cleaning the fields, weeding, tilling the soil and aerating it, fixing the sprinkler system, and so on. Well, a month has gone by and today we’ve reached an important milestone: we’ve booked the leaf picker for next Monday morning and the tea factory is on standby. There are only a few days left to get it all ready. Is it tough work? — You bet!

Today our spirits are lifted as rain has finally decided to pour on our dry fields and do more than just wet the surface. This is the help that all of us in the community was counting on for months and it has finally arrived. A few good days of rain until Monday can make a difference in the yield. But now, oddly enough, we are praying for the rain to not last further than the weekend… because Monday is picking day!

– to be continued –